#7 – James Long: Actual Budget, Hybrid Logical Clocks & Absurd-SQL

The guest of this episode is James Long, the creator of local-first app called Actual Budget and the absurd-sql project which helped to pave the way to bring SQLite back to the browser. This conversation will explore his journey of building Actual Budget including implementing a syncing solution from scratch and expanding from an Electron app to mobile and the web while re-using most of the code.

00:00 Intro
01:58 Electron/Actual
05:09 SQLite as Data Layer
12:29 Best Practies
17:24 Hypological Clocks
25:08 Merkle Trees
31:54 Beyond Electron
34:52 React Native
39:22 Working on mobile apps
44:54 Bringing the app to the web
53:19 Absurd-SQL
01:11:32 Transition to Open Source
01:24:15 Opinions on React
01:32:58 Outro

Mentioned in podcast:
James Long: x.com/jlongster + jlongster.com
https://jlongster.com/where-have-i-been
https://actualbudget.org/
https://github.com/actualbudget/actual
https://sergeiturukin.com/2017/06/26/...
https://github.com/nodejs-mobile/node...
https://github.com/jlongster/absurd-sql

Links:

Website: https://localfirst.fm
X/Twitter: https://x.com/localfirstfm
Local-First Conf 2024: https://www.localfirstconf.com

Thank you to https://expo.dev/ and https://crabnebula.dev/ for supporting the podcast